Transcript: STEFANIE BRENDL on Being Humbled by Sharks /242
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young, today I'm speaking with Stefanie Brendl.
Stefanie Brendl That's the kind of thinking that we're struggling with, that sharks are really only seen as a collection of parts that can be sold.
Ayana Young Stefanie Brendl is an advocate for sharks, and a creative and social entrepreneur that leads campaigns and projects in all corners of this planet. As founder and executive director of Shark Allies and team member of various NGO coalitions she has dedicated her last two decades to bringing greater protection to sharks. As filmmaker and producer she also filmed and produced a documentary called Extinction Soup about the perils of shark finning.
Well welcome Stefanie to the podcast, I'm really looking forward to diving in with you around sharks and the ocean and all that good stuff.
Stefanie Brendl Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
Ayana Young Yeah, well, I would like to begin our conversation in reverence for our shark kin. These truly wild and mystic apex predators have inhabited waters for 450 million years, meaning their existence even pre-dates trees. I know there are over 400 species of sharks, each with its own unique set of characteristics, but I wonder if you could speak to the majesty of these creatures and how easy it should be for us to replace common fear with a deep sense of respect for their resilience?
Stefanie Brendl Well, I think if everyone had the privilege of meeting sharks in person, we would have a completely different general feeling about sharks. I think we're, as human beings, we're scared of what we don't know and what we don't see and the less we see it, the more scared we are because we fill in the blanks with the myths and the stories and the anecdotes that we hear. And the only anecdotes we ever hear of sharks are shark attacks, and for anyone that has had a chance to be in the water and see sharks, this whole impression changes from, you know, at the minimum, being apprehensive, and at the worst having a phobia, it changes to being completely fascinated and you know recognizing this presence in the water. They are large animals and, you know, unlike some of the smaller fish, you really feel their presence in the water when you're there and you realize immediately that they're just there to do their job, they're there because it's their natural place, we're the ones out of place, and they have no particular interest in us they're not suddenly turning to attack anyone, they're looking at us as maybe a curiosity. And you know, that is something it's very hard to get that across to people more and more now. You know, we have beautiful imagery and video and photos and that has really helped, but it still doesn't give you the true feeling and the true respect that you feel when you're in the water with them.
Ayana Young Yeah, I could imagine that just yeah, picturing myself in the water with them and the connection that I'm sure it would come through. And yeah-
Stefanie Brendl If I can say it and in a different way, it's not necessarily a connection where you know, when you meet a dog or a horse and you feel very much like you want to go pet them and you know, you want to almost cuddle them, with sharks, you realize that you are meeting a predator, a wild animal, and there is a huge amount of respect there. That it's not necessarily frightening, but you do understand that, that that's a different type of animal, you know, that animal really is there, and couldn't care less about human beings. And you do understand that, then you truly don't mean anything to them, which is, I think it's a great experience for human beings to not be important. And I kind of like that about wild animals that you know, in their worldview, and in their daily going on, you don't matter except when you are the one that hunts them, or, you know, hurts them. So I think that's, that's a big difference between sharks, and encountering sharks and some of the other animals, it may be similar to meeting a grizzly bear or wolves or lions, you know, meeting a predator is, is on a whole nother level.
Ayana Young Thank you for speaking to that and I think it's so important to hear about that humbling experience for us humans, because we really need that a lot. So I yeah, I appreciate that.
Stefanie Brendl We don't get that very often, you know, we don't, we don't get connected to real raw nature very often, and we don't have a lot of natural fears. I mean, we have natural fears but we don’t have things that threaten us in nature anymore except natural disasters. But on average, when you go out, you know, the chances of having a dangerous animal around are pretty small. And I think connecting to that primal part of you, that really puts you back to when you know, when you humans lived on the land, and we're just another animal, we were for those animals, for land predators, we may have been prey and I think it's a good thing to connect to that at times.
Ayana Young Absolutely. And it's often overlooked, but sharks play a vital role in our oceans. As I understand, sharks act similarly to vultures as they scavenge for sick and injured fish, working to keep oceans healthy and populations in balance. And I know that, for example, when the eastern seaboard saw a local decline of great white sharks; there was a huge boom in rays and thus a total decline in scallops. And so, we’d be naive to think that we won’t see this happen worldwide should shark populations continue to plummet. What are the immediate implications of global shark extirpation, and perhaps within that you can also highlight for us the reality that there is actually no way to mimic or recreate the role of sharks...
Stefanie Brendl Yeah, so that's a complicated thing to explain. You know, sharks, there are so many different shark species, and each species has a certain niche in the ecosystem that they take care of. So while some may operate a little bit like a vulture, others are more, you know, akin to a lion or a wolf. Basically, the pressure of predators not only controls the populations in the sense that they take out the sick, the dead, and the dying, and therefore, keeping the healthiest alive to reproduce, they're also, of course, taking care of like you said, the dead and even just the sheer presence changes how all the other animals behave, and how they, for example, graze on sea grasses, or how far they move away from the reef to hunt. So they're really ecosystem engineers, when they're around, everything changes.
My most favorite example is the wolves in Yosemite Park, that, you know, when they were reintroduced, because they had a problem with deer, it changed everything from how the aspen trees were growing because of how the deer were grazing and even where they were, where they would mingle and hang out. And of course, they controlled the numbers, the wolves controlled the numbers, but it also affected erosion, because of how you know, the trees were growing and shrubs were eaten down, and all the way down to how the rivers were flowing. So this is the role that we really need to see sharks as in the ocean, they are controlling the ecosystem in many, many different ways. And that of course, is something - good luck for us to figure out how to do it, we couldn't even do it on land. That's why the wolves were reintroduced, the humans could not replicate what the wolves were doing because there's too many layers and too many very subtle effects. Good luck trying to do something like that in the ocean, you know, you cannot have boundaries there, you cannot make fences, we can barely even get lower than 300 feet in the water. So how would we ever control it, and you cannot breed sharks in captivity, once we lose them, it's not like we're going to go on a massive action to reintroduce and replenish the stock. So this is a free service we get, you know, sharks taking care of the ocean, naturally have done it in the most perfect way that we can never replicate. And all we have to do is stop from over hunting them, we don't really have to do much more, there is not an additional investment that we have to spend. But the only way we can do it is to stop overfishing them in the first place, because they do not replenish themselves very quickly, because they are predators and predators, by default, reproduce very slowly, because they're not being hunted and therefore, you know, nature has designed it in a way where they produce in a limited number. So here we are, you know, we have an incredibly important animal for a system that the whole planet depends on. All of us, no matter where you live, depend on the ocean, in one way or another. And we're just haphazardly just, you know, overfishing them, and we don't really care because we can't see it. We can't see what's going on under the ocean. So out of sight out of mind.
Ayana Young Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'd like to I’d like to now focus on some of the most immediate threats to shark populations, but I wonder if we might be able to do so in recognition that this is what capitalism looks like at sea - much of the ocean’s biodiversity is at risk because of modern industrialized fishing efforts and the way in which the global market operates, and I think unfortunately for quite some time the blame has been placed on other countries, so-called “bad actors”, or cultural differences...but the problem is really the scale at which these global captures are taking place and quite frankly, what I see as the callousness of capitalism. So with this in mind, I wonder if you can share why there is an economic benefit to killing sharks and the scale at which it is being done around the world?
Stefanie Brendl Yeah, the numbers are staggering. When we look at how many sharks are being taken every year. You know, the estimates depending on what research you are looking at, and how conservatively you want to use the numbers, is somewhere between 63 million to 273 million sharks. Other studies say it's 70 to 100 million sharks, let's just even go with the lowest number 63 million sharks per year taken, that is a staggering number. When you even just try to imagine what that looks like in actual bodies. The sharks are valuable to retain even if they're bycatch these days, because of the parts that can be sold. You know, if there's value to sell something, then it's being either hunted or being targeted or kept, even if it was caught accidentally. So sharks are being taken for meat, for fins, in the case of manta rays, which are also part of the family of sharks, the elasmobranchs, they're taken from the gill plates, and then of course, shark liver oil. So all of those products contribute to giving value to sharks.
Some sharks are more valuable than others. From some you can only take the meat, others only the fins, sometimes you can take the fins and the oil or only the fins and the meat. So there's not separate markets or separate fisheries for you know, the different parts so it’s very hard to dissect how much are sharks hunted for one or the other product. And then the additional problem to knowing the numbers is, of course, that there's a lot of illegal under reported or unreported fishing going on and the labeling between the countries you know, the coding of how things are being shipped around the world, any shark parts can be thrown in as general seafood, so you wouldn’t even know if it was shark. So it's really a chaotic trade that is global.
In essence, what drives it is the market and the value that can be derived from sharks and shark parts, and a large part of that is still to be contributed to fins because the fins have the highest value on the shark. So keeping it and only making money on fins and maybe a few extra cents on meat, or even the meat could even just be given to the pet food industry. It's often not even for human consumption, so it doesn't even help us with food security. So it's a very sort of, it's a shady business where everyone passes the buck, as you said, you know, each trade says, “Oh, it's the other guys. We're not the bad ones. It's the other country. It's this other industry. It's the market for fins. It's the market for oil, it's a market for meat.” And everything else is considered byproducts. When you think about it, who eats 200 million sharks, it's impossible to even imagine that we need this many sharks, because they're not that many countries that actually consume shark. So what are all these animals being killed for is really a basic question that everyone tries to avoid.
Ayana Young Wow. Oh, gosh, just hearing those numbers and thinking about the pet food is so horrifying and disgusting and I'm just thinking about how international demand for shark, ray, and skate meat has more than doubled since the early 1990s, and I do wonder how much of this demand grew in response to marketing or accessibility… but specifically I’d like to ask you about how you’re going about “reducing the unsustainable consumption” of something like shark fin? And potentially how much of that work is also at some level recognizing the ways in which we exploit the natural world to signal class status?
Stefanie Brendl Yeah, so the reason why the meat market for sharks has gone up is probably a mix of several reasons. One of them is that other fish stocks in certain regions are so depleted, that sharks ended up being the only thing that can be caught. And suddenly, sharks when they used to be considered trash fish, well, that's all we can get, so that's what they're going to catch. And then also, once the market is keen on selling a product, they create the demand in a sense, where they just push it to the market and start advertising it or they push it into, you know, the pet food industry, they will find a way to sell it or to market it. So it goes both ways. It's not just that, you know, consumers want it and therefore it's caught, it also goes the other way around, if it gets caught and they want to sell it, they can also create a market for it.
For example, you know, the gill rakers, that market didn’t even exist a few decades ago and because manta rays are so each to catch it, they were something that were also targeted for their fins even though they are small, you know they just made up a product and put out some stories that it might be good for you; just like shark cartilage, somebody wanted to find a market for shark cartilage and the, let's say rumors were put out that they help cancer, and they help your joints, and they have all these things and there was never even a study done on it. So it's easy to sell snake oil to people when you tell them the wonderful effects it can have.
And, of course, a big driver of the shark meat market was the fact that fins are worth so much money and when sharks are caught for their fins, it makes sense to also try to sell the the meat, especially in countries where the law demands that you bring in the sharks whole in order to take the fins when you can't do finning and see anymore, because that was something that was outlawed by many countries, you know, a few decades ago, because it's cruel and wasteful, the finning of sharks was outlawed, meaning you can't cut the fins off and throw the bodies back into the ocean, sharks were meant to be brought back whole and then you could process them. So since they had to bring the bodies back they then said “Well, let's sell the meat and let's make the meat more marketable.” So that really increased the demand for the market for shark meat. And that's just as you said in the beginning, it's capitalism in the sense that it's just about who can make the money and short term thinking. The people making the money and paying for sharks right now, they are not paying for the damage that is being done to the ocean. That's all of us. All of us will be paying for that. That goes all the way to the fish oil industry for supplements and it goes all the way to cosmetics and squalene, they consider shark squalene an inexpensive product - that's because they're not truly paying for the sharks that they're using, only paying for the oil that somebody gave them. That person fishing, that shark did not truly pay for the cost of that shark, the true costs of the shark that it means to the environment and to all of us.
So that's the kind of thinking that we're struggling with, that sharks are really only seen as a collection of parts that can be sold, you know, that we could put a price tag on their fin, on their liver, on their meat, maybe on their teeth and maybe on their skin sometimes. And that's all they're looked at, is a collection of parts. They're not looked at as the value they have as a complete being and, you know, I had this conversation with a friend just the other week, no one in their right mind would consider hunting lions or tigers on a commercial level for food, you know, that just immediately strikes you as wrong. And yes, maybe their coat would be valuable, maybe their claws, maybe their livers, maybe their teeth, there'll be all sorts of things you could probably make off a lion, but I bet you everyone that just heard that line immediately sort of recoiled and said, “Well, that would be that would be stupid, that can't work.” And that's really on a different level what we're dealing with with sharks is that they are slow producing and reproducing, and they are predators, but we just look at them as a product. Nothing but dollar signs.
Ayana Young I believe that over the past couple of years, there has been significant pressure across many countries to regulate wildlife trading through multilateral treaties like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, but I think it’s probably misguided to think that these sort of treaties come close to addressing the problem. What are some of the discrepancies between the international level versus the national level when it comes to regulating shark products, or what are some of the most glaring legal loopholes that the industry is able to exploit?
Stefanie Brendl Well, let me go straight to the convention, CITES, you just mentioned, it's very important that we get animals and species listed on the CITES listings, however, it's only one part of many things that have to be done because what people don't understand about this listing is that, first of all, it is a convention of treaty members that signed on this is not every country that is part of CITES, and the different appendices, the appendix one, two, and three mean different types of protection. It really is a trade agreement, meaning that if the species is in one of the lists, it means that on the highest listing, for example, in appendix one, they're permitted to be hunted only under exceptional circumstances, meaning well, if a country determines that it's an exceptional circumstance, that those protected species can still be hunted. And in appendix two is, you know, there's this term called non-detrimental meaning, you know, a country can only trade that species if it can be done in a non-detrimental way or if the utilization is not incompatible with survival. Well, that leaves a lot of room to be interpreted by each country.
The US for example, determined that Mako is, well Mako is incredibly endangered and the numbers are dropping, but in the U.S.A. the authorities determined that, you know, the U.S. fisheries were doing such a great job that the hunting and trade of Mako is not detrimental, so it can continue. So there are lots of ways to wiggle through these. Also other endangered species listings, there are just listings, it doesn't mean that they're enforceable, you know, and, and when people hear that something is on the Red List, it doesn't mean anyone is sticking to that list saying, “Oh, it's on the list, we better not hunt it”, it means someone still has to enforce that.
Certain products, you know, one of the more successful ways to enforce endangered species products is to go at them at a trade level, for sure because sometimes protecting the whole animal is difficult, but in the case of fins, or elephant ivory, many countries have decided to prohibit the sale and the trade and this is what we've been working on a lot with fins is to prohibit the sale and trade of the actual product, the fins, so they can come and go or be sold or be offered for sale in restaurants. That is again, it doesn't necessarily stop it at the fishing level, but it stops a country from contributing to the problem. So you can tell already that none of these things are the absolute perfect solutions and unfortunately, that's what we're dealing with with animal protection. We have, you know, 10 or 15 different tools. And we try each one to chip away at the problem and hopefully the combination of all those tools will bring about more protection, you know that of course, you know, you have to add to it regulating fisheries on land, you know, creating parks in the ocean, creating marine protected areas. All of those things, none, no single one is perfect. And when people like to jump on certain campaigns saying, “What's the point of this it’s still not going to fix overfishing, or it's still not going to address the problem of bycatch.” Well, there's always something else that's worse, and always something else that will not be addressed. But you have to start somewhere and that's really the only thing we can work with is trying to work on protection and conservation on many different levels.
Ayana Young Yeah, and because of how media has historically talked about shark finning, I think many might think that this is an issue that is solely being driven by Asian countries, but the United States is the seventh-largest shark-fishing country in the world, and we’re also complicit in terms of its location in the supply chain. Back in 2019 it was reported that between 2010 to 2017, the United States was the middleman to roughly 772 tons of shark fin exports, or 1.29 million sharks, that passed through U.S. ports. What is the United State’s complicity look like in the illegal shark fin trade and how could stronger regulatory resources change this?
Stefanie Brendl Well, if you think about it, in terms of how you would deal with this with drugs, if you are not the user, and you're not the producer of the drugs, then if you are the one selling it in the middle, what's your part of you know, of the problem? You're just as guilty because you're enabling the trade and the movement of the product and through that you are not making the statement that you're against it. You know, you cannot say you're against finning, or the trade of fins and then allow the trade.
A lot of the justification for that is that there's a big part of even the science community that still likes to claim that sustainable shark fishing is a possibility and that we should focus all of our attention towards developing sustainable shark fishing, and therefore the fins should be a valuable product that make that industry possible. Now, the problem with that is, is that the only places that has proven to be possible were very isolated, small pockets of shark species where there was a very highly controlled fishery, that only fish to there certain times a year, you know, didn't take certain, let's say didn’t take the females and was extremely conscientious about sticking to quotas, which is not something that is possible on a large scale. So there is a justification that comes from the fishery’s agencies, from our own agencies that are in charge of conservation and fisheries, but they tend to really rule in favor of the commercial fishing lobby most of the time. They want to keep that industry going, because the U.S. has a mandate to use its resources at an optimal yield. That's even in our Fisheries Act, it says it should use all resources at an optimal level, meaning, not fishing enough is not a good thing and I think that thinking has to drastically change, because for decades, that has been the mandate and look where it's gotten us.
You know, if I always say if the fisheries agencies were a corporation, they would be failing miserably, they would be bankrupt, they would be fired for mismanagement. But you know, because it is government agencies and they choose their own experts on their panels, they can continue to say “We're the authority and we say it's possible, and therefore, we're going to continue to allow it.” So yeah, every country that participates in the fin trade is part of the problem, whether you're fishing your own sharks or not. And you can't, you can't really use that excuse anymore.
Ayana Young Yeah, and just thinking about the drones and it's almost like this warlike mentality of finding fish in the oceans, and the technology being used to chase fish and sharks is horrifying. It speaks a lot to where we are as just a culture right now. And yeah, I wanted to mention that what initially drew me to Shark Allies was some of the news that was coming out early in 2020 that was talking about the ramifications of possible COVID-19 vaccines containing squalene, which is a compound derived from shark liver oil. And I think most of us may be more familiar with squalene as a substance found in cosmetic products. And although there are plant substitutes to squalene, I understand that these are more cumbersome to procure and also more expensive then shark based squalene. So to begin, I wonder if you could clarify what does the current demand for squalene look like, what industry is behind it, and how many sharks are being killed to meet the demand?
Stefanie Brendl So the cosmetics industry is still the larger user of shark oil, the fact that it is used, the liver oil is used, you know to make squalene for vaccines was something completely new that we stumbled across I mean, for us it was new - I know that other people knew about this and of course, may have known about it but also not thought it was a big problem until we looked into it. It became more relevant because of the COVID vaccines.
My thinking was, if we are going to see sharks as an animal that saves human lives, that can become a really difficult thing to overcome. Even if there are alternatives you know, once the the recognition or the belief is there that we need sharks to fight COVID that's what initially scared me the most about this is that that's just one more reason that will give fisheries a free for all to say, “Hey, we're doing it to to save human human life.” That's the initial thought I had when my team came across it. And yes, let me say straight from the beginning that the amount of squalene used in vaccines right now is still small compared to what's used in cosmetics, and squalene use is still very small compared to other products like fins and meat. The point is that, in the case of squalene, it can be made from many, many sources and the belief that it is harder to make, and that it is more expensive to make is not really true anymore. That is something that was put out and yes, it might have been true when sharks were incredibly plentiful. But just think about what will happen when a shark fishery collapses, well then the price for squalene will go up very quickly. It's a very, very unreliable source.
Also, depending on an a wild animal for a substance that is needed on a global basis for something that is very important, like a vaccine, it seems incredibly short sighted to me because this is something we don't just need one time this is going to be for decades, we're going to have new mutations, there's going to be more coronaviruses. And once more and more squalene adjuvants, let's say in the case of vaccines, squalene is in the adjuvants, once more and more of them are being patented and used, they will also be marketed. Once it is a product ,it will be sold, it will be made, and it will be used. So it's not so much about what is happening immediately now it's where this could lead and it could just be one more product, that means additional shark species will be taken.
I understand that squalene, very often, the liver oil is very often a byproduct of another fishery, nobody's going out to hunt sharks specifically for vaccines, squalene, that's not what we're saying, but shark liver oil is most abundant in deep sea sharks, sharks that that live below 300 to 1500 meters, and those are sharks that may not even be commercially exploited for any other reason. So suddenly, there will be an interest in retaining sharks that you know, they are actually quite mysterious, they haven't even been studied, half of them are highly threatened and the other half have never even been studied. We don't even know about their life cycles and how they reproduce or how many of them there are. So there's a lot of problems with squalene in vaccine use, the fact that the processing might be more expensive, it connects to the issue of purification, squalene for cosmetics does not have to have to be as pure as it has to be for vaccines, of course. So the oil from olives, which is a very common squalene in cosmetics, is very difficult to get to that purity of vaccine use, but squalene can be made from many other sources and one of them that is highly, you know, usable for vaccines is bio-engineered squalene made from sugarcane that is then fed to yeast, and yeast, and that will then produce any kind of squalene that you want under extremely controlled processes. So that just shows you it can be done and in, you know, a process like that is reproducible in the exact same way under very controlled controlled conditions and does not have to be taken from a wild animal species. If it costs a little extra money for testing, I think that is a cost that the pharmaceutical industry can afford, because they are going to make billions and billions of dollars off of vaccines and so as the beauty industry, if it costs a little more to figure out how to use a plant squalene or a bio-engineered squalene, so be it because again, these companies are not really paying for the true costs of sharks and to claim that sharks need to be used because they're cheaper is not going to hold up very much longer.
Ayana Young And just to even want to use the excuse that sharks are cheaper is really sick and it says so much about where we are as a culture-
Stefanie Brendl Yeah, and I have to say that there are probably some brands and some companies, especially smaller ones, may not even realize that they're shark in their squalene because of the way it is being marketed. Sometimes squalene is just sold as “could be from animal or plants” and it doesn’t even mention the word shark. So there's a huge awareness raising need, which is part of the reason why we're doing it. It's not so much that we see squalene as the worst problem, but it is something that the consumers are not aware of and honestly a lot of consumers are kind of shocked when they find out that their cosmetics do have sharks in them. And that some of their vaccines or treatments, you know that there's other things that that squalene is in, there are some bactericides, there's some hemorrhoidal creams, there's all sorts of things that have sharks in them. Some of them, it's really just to be used as an emollient and I'm sorry, but we have lots of other ways to create emollients than to kill a wild animal.
Ayana Young Yeah, and it's just interesting to point out the connection between shark decline and our obsession with youth in terms of beauty products, it's like I said, I just have this, this other analysis going on in my mind around the insanity of it all. And now, you know, I understand that typically squalene comes from deep-sea sharks, because they produce significantly larger amounts of it, but this means that entire species may potentially be decimated as they are solely caught and killed for their livers. So what is needed to prevent this from happening? And if you are consuming squalene products, what do you need to know?
Stefanie Brendl Well, I think consumer awareness helps a lot and we've actually had lots of people helping us with contacting companies to ask them to switch. I think consumer pressure can cause, especially beauty companies more than anything, to change what they use, I think also transparency in labeling. Very often a product will say squalene, but it doesn't tell you where it's from. If you look, if you start looking at your labels, and if it says only squalene, it doesn't say derived from olives, then it probably is shark because anyone that's aware of the fact that they, well anyone that has switched and chosen to use plant squalene is usually aware of the problem and will want to announce it. So it's almost like, you know, it's a bonus to be able to say,
“Hey, this is made from olives.”
So labeling, being aware of what you use, and choosing products that don't have it sometimes the difficulty is you have to actually go to the website of that product and see if they have a contents list. And on the vaccine side, you know, pharmaceutical companies they're very hard to address and deal with, we're working on that we're trying to start communications with them to see if they would consider changing the process, it's going to be a process, they're not going to be able to just swap one for the other because there's a lot of testing that has to happen, and clinical trials, etc. But the process has to start at some point. And we're trying to bring in different organizations and people that could influence the pharmaceutical industry to even think about making this switch, you know, this is probably not going to happen through laws, it's going to have to be because the corporation's want to do the right thing and the consumers want to do the right thing.
It's a monumental effort, but I try not to think about how little we can get done, but to just get started and do it anyway and this is why we wanted to raise awareness first, we're not claiming to have all the answers. We're not claiming to have even exactly every stat and every piece of data about it, but we do know it's bad enough, and we do know it needs to change. And that's what we're working on, we're trying to make the changes where we can at the time we can and as you can imagine trying to do this during COVID has been very sensitive, we're trying not to in any way appear as if we want to slow down a COVID vaccine. What we are saying is that if these vaccines are going to be around for decades to come. We need to start thinking about testing alternatives alongside the established ones because if we never start testing them, they'll never be replaced and we'll keep having this argument 10 and 20 years from now.
Ayana Young I’ve read several different statistics on how many sharks are killed every year; either from gill nets, shark finning, or for squalene, and the number is somewhere around 100 million annually, but please correct me if that has changed, and so something that I want to point out is how our rapid consumption is also just totally incompatible with biological paces, can you speak a bit about the sexual maturity and gestation periods for sharks and how that factors into conservation dialogue, as well as the reality that sharks are inching towards extinction.
Stefanie Brendl Yeah, I think because there are so many different species, it varies, of course, you know, how, how late their maturity is and how many young they have and how old they grow. It varies anywhere from, you know, just looking at the age range from, let's say, reef sharks may live 20 to 30 years and then you go to a deep sea shark, I believe the Greenland shark, they caught one that they think might have been 400 years old, but that particular shark may not even be sexually mature until it's 90, or something like that. It seems impossible that an animal like that could even exist.
But generally speaking, to understand how sharks work is to think of mammals. You know, sharks are fish, but they really reproduce more, like other mammals, compared to dolphins, for example, they have to be sometimes in their teenage years. Let's say with a great white shark, you know, they have to be in their teenage years before they're sexually mature, then they only have a litter of pups every other year, possibly. They have a long gestation period; some species have they're pregnant for anywhere from nine to 12 or 13 months. So yeah, and the litters are small, you know, I think if the whale shark is one that has, you know, maybe 30 to 40 young, but most of the shark species have a lot fewer of them, some only give birth to one and so you can see that this is not like a tuna that within a year is sexually mature, and then lays 1000s and 1000s of eggs every year. These are animals that reproduce, you know, like dogs and cats and they live off of protein, so this is one of the biggest reasons why we cannot breed them, you know, even if they could be kept in captivity, we could not breed them, because the numbers of reproduction would be so slow, it's it, it wouldn't be worth it.
That's why we're outpacing, you know, outpacing the numbers, because most shark species probably cannot handle any commercial exploitation and meaning, you know, one could say, well, what kind of exploitation could they? Well they could potentially handle some subsistence fishing, you know, people fishing for food, just, you know, for their village here and there, as long as they're not using it, you know, to fuel the whole business. But it's very difficult because what we consider to be sustainable, is counting the fish that are being caught and as long as the numbers of fish being caught is kind of somewhat steady, the agencies determine that it must be sustainable, but it's by no means that way. By the time the numbers plummet, it's often too late for that population to recover. So, you know, it's not a very complicated issue to understand, you know, we're fishing more than then then the populations can replenish and we do that for many species, but for sharks it's especially critical. And if you wanted another number, I mean, the most recent study that just came out, says that since 1970, sharks and rays have been declining by 71%. So that means many of those species because it's, you know, maybe more or less for some, but many other species are indeed heading for extinction levels.
Ayana Young I came across an interview you gave, where you talked about the desire to see us move away from these sorts of adrenaline based industries, like shark dives, and instead move into ways of knowing that are more “subtle and layered”, and it’s so refreshing to hear this, because so often, even advocates for sharks are still selling them as this sort of sensational creature that is here for our amusement, and so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and just really challenging us to move out of this thirst for resources, entertainment, and dominion and into a new form of relationship between humans and predators?
Stefanie Brendl Well, that's, you know, shark tourism, and diving with sharks is, in general, a very positive thing. You know, it is what has created the awareness of sharks and has created a vast amount of people that love sharks now and that are passionate about sharks. That is the reason why there are so many photos and video clips of sharks, on Instagram and Facebook, that is all very, very positive, and it is actually needed and it is the only reason why sharks are now really being considered as an animal that should be protected. So just to clarify that I'm not at all against shark diving, I think shark diving is very, very important. What I don't like is if shark diving is presented in a way that promotes the shark diver more than the shark and what I mean is, is when they present it as if it was a daredevil stunt, or look at me in the danger zone, or look at me dominating this animal or, you know, in a way that this is like, “Oh, I bungee jumped in and I then I dove for sharks, and I'm crazy like that!” You know, that doesn't help us. I think that's becoming less and less prominent, though, I think people are starting to see through that.
I think that looking for encounters with sharks is something that sometimes it can be negative, like anything else, you know, dive tourism can be damaging to the reef, it can be damaging to, you know, the fish population, because there's just too many people in the water, but it is the best thing we have going that as an alternative to fishing because economies still have to be fueled by something and diving is a great alternative like everything else. There's good operators, there's bad operators, there is good behavior and bad behavior and sometimes you can't avoid one while you have the other. So I think it's all about how it's done and since shark diving is a little bit new, it had to go through these years of where it was being sensationalized and unfortunately, it still is on social media, in many cases where there's a real tendency to people wanting to be seen diving with sharks, and really it is more about them than about sharks and more about them being brave or having some particular skill, then then it is about shark conservation. But in the process, you know, honestly, any positive shark image probably helps the process along. We won't like all of them, but I don't agree with everything needing to be perfect. We can't have perfection, it's going to go a little wrong here and there. So you know, human beings generally kind of overdo certain things and the same happened with shark diving. So I think generally, it's a good thing. I don't think that we can go out and say everybody leave everything alone. That's not going to happen. There's too many of us and we have too much interest in the ocean, fishing, sport, fishing, diving, spearfishing, that is not going to go away. We just have to figure out how to do it in the right way. That's the hardest part. You know, figuring out how to optimize it.
Ayana Young Yeah. Well, Stefanie, there's so much that you shared with us today that is so important. And really I feel like it is asking us to sit with the complexity and think about these kin that most of us know of but are not even beginning to understand what's happening to them and the implications and the complicity of it all. So thank you so much for devoting your time and your love and your passion to these creatures and for being able to communicate to us what's happening in their world, which is our world, of course, and how to connect all the dots. I really appreciated this conversation. But if there is anything else that you'd like to add in that hasn't been talked about, please do so.
Stefanie Brendl I think I would just walk away by saying that within the community that is forming the community of shark conservationists and advocates, and particularly the people that are very involved online, I think I would like everyone to consider to try and be helpful, you know, and to not tear into people that are doing things that are less than perfect or perceived to be less than perfect. Because I want to emphasize that again, none of us have the perfect solution. We're always struggling to find those. And we're not always addressing the biggest solutions, but we should always stay involved and we should always move things forward, even if it's incrementally. Everyone can do that. And I think that's really, I always try to look forward and I'd like everyone else to look forward and let's keep looking for progress that we can make. If we look back and think about how dire the situation is for sharks then we're all going to quit right now. So let's look forward and let's keep looking for ways that we can move the cause forward.
Ayana Young Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Stefanie.
Stefanie Brendl Thank you for having me.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Bird by Snow, Handmade Moments, and Left Vessel. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell, with special research assistance by Julia Jackson.